Death and Mourning

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

What if this present were the world’s last night?

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damn’d; alas; why should I be?

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls.

The world’s whole sap is sunk: The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

When I died last, and dear, I die As often as from thee I go.

Oh do not die, for I shall hate All women so, when thou art gone.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

But think that we Are but turn’d aside to sleep.

Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; But since that I Must die at last, ’tis best, To use my self in jest Thus by feign’d deaths to die.

As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here; Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

Some come to take their ease And sleep an act or two.

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself.

He gave his honors to the world again, His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him!

An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; Give him a little earth for charity.

And sleep in dull cold marble.

I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting: I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more.

Go with me, like good angels, to my end; And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me, Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, And lift my soul to heaven.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. 57